For the first 60 feet and beyond, Mike Kamm's brand new all-electric Honda Fit EV is pulling away from a C5 Corvette convertible in the near lane, which is driven tentatively by a kid we later guessed has to be the owner's son. "Look at this! It's un-American!" yells the announcer from the tower. "There's something wrong here!" And he doesn't know half the story. The stock Chevy isn't particularly loud, especially at part throttle, but it makes enough noise that the lack from the Honda isn't apparent.

By the end of 1280 feet, the kid doesn't allow the Fit to win, but it hangs in there until the end, when the announcer feels secure enough to allow that Hondas are actually decent cars. Nice of him. The Fit still turns in a 16.33-second run at 84.20 mph to the Corvette's pitiful 16.19 @ 75.24.

Electric racing is almost uncharted territory for serious car lovers. Sure, there have been plenty of Teslas down the strip, but those are mostly novelty runs in a "Ha ha, look at this inappropriate thing I'm doing with an expensive car, aren't I naughty?" sort of way. The only attention on the track here, though, was negative and as far as anyone knows, this is the first run down a dragstip by a privately held Fit EV. But I keep thinking that if this was a bracket race, where you try to hit a particular elapsed time (your dial-in), the Fit EV would be just about the ideal vehicle.

If it was easy, bracket racing wouldn't exist. But it's hard, because no two runs are the same. Your car warms up, the track surface changes in the heat, your tires warm up and cool down, the angle of the sun changes, and with every factor your car's performance changes. Mastering the tuning and sense of your car is where bracket racing enters the territory of art and science. This is why bracket racers like to run automatics for repeatable shifts and there are calculations you can do to account for the effects of temperature and humidity.

Hypothetically, if you had a powerplant that was independent of as many of those factors as possible, you'd have something like the ultimate bracket racer, where all you had to do was put your foot down and click off the same times over and over again. Plus, Mike has his own solar panels and figures his running costs are about 2¢/mile, which with a maintenance-free car makes it the cheapest racing imaginable. But, would it actually be racing and what possible satisfaction could there be in a plug-in racecar? Would it be...fun?

It turns out the biggest challenge was actually in finding out if racing was possible in the first place. Honda does not permit you to alter their car in any meaningful way: The bolts on the motor controller box are marked and tamper-resistant, and you cannot own the vehicle. Like the GM EV1, it's only available as a lease and at the end of 36 months, the manufacturer takes it back. Honda hasn't said what they'll do with it, but they'll almost certainly tear the cars down for analysis, then crush them. In Japan, you can get a NISMO body kit and performance reprogramming for your Nissan Leaf, but a performance Fit EV is a long way off. However, nothing is stopping you from removing the charger, mirrors, back seat and airing up to 50 psi. Later on, he plans to experiment with aero tweaks like taping off seams and blocking off the lower air inlet.

"I tried a few different driving techniques," said Mike. "Turning off the traction control did nothing, nor did power braking. The car would not allow it. If you have your foot on the brake and accelerator at the same time you simply don't move."

As you'd expect from an EV, the times are amazingly consistent: The 16.33 is followed by a 16.31 @ 84.46, 16.32 @ 84.57 and a 16.32 @ 84.76--if there were money on this, it'd be Mike's. He can't explain the slow but steady increase in trap speed, "Not what you would expect from a battery electric." There was about an hour between passes, so an opportunity to do back to back runs would be helpful to see if there was a difference.

There are no benchmarks for electric car racing, nor a template for performance. In fact, as the Fit has a black box and maybe telemetry, Honda has access to all the useage data from Mike's car. The 1,000 Fit EVs released to the public are being used for real world testing. With a 70-mile range, it's market is the short-range commuter. This one's skewing that curve and this winter there will be even more esoteric data when Mike takes the car ice-racing, then tries autocross and hillclimb later on when the lease is about to expire. He's already planning for a more performance-oriented EV when this one goes back. (A pure electric CRV would make his day, Honda.)

Down in the staging lanes betweeen runs, the next generation finds the car when Mike opens the hood. As we examine it, people start wandering over: The guys with the Acura in the next lane, a kid with a Fox body Mustang, even the Corvette's driver. When it gets too dark for photos and I leave, they stay.

Unlike the the middle-aged announcer in the tower, these are people who have grown up in a computerized culture that finds an EV just as interesting as their own gas-engined cars and for them, Mike is establishing a baseline for the future of racing. If in 10 years your Honda EV has a secret bonkers mode you unlock by holding down "Drive" for seven seconds while putting your foot to the floor, it'll be because of a few pioneers doing what they weren't supposed to, back when the old guys scoffed and the new electrics were young.